Top 90 David Sheff Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It must be like a soldier in a trench during a bombing raid. I’ve shut down every nonessential emotion – worry, fear – concentrating every neuron in my new brain on the moment in order to stay alive.”

— David Sheff

52. “I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.”

— David Sheff

53. “Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.”

— David Sheff

54. “We are still nearer the winter edge of spring on this cool and misty May afternoon, the scent of wood smoke in the air – a remnant of the afternoon fire.”

— David Sheff

55. “Sometimes, it strikes me that life goes on, but it does, inexorably.”

— David Sheff

56. “The room has Nic’s smell – not the sweet childhood smell he once had, but a cloying odor of incense and marijuana, cigarettes and aftershave, possibly a trace of ammonia or formaldehyde, the residual odor of burning meth. Smells like teen spirit.”

— David Sheff

57. “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts.”

— David Sheff

58. “I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function. – KURT COBAIN, in his suicide note.”

— David Sheff

59. “I well up with tears for it. For all of it. On the one hand: the uncertain future. The possibility of another hemorrhage. The chance that my children will be killed in a car accident. The chance that Nic will relapse. A million other catastrophes. On the other: compassion and love. For my parents and family. For my friends. For Karen. For my children. I may feel more fragile and vulnerable, but I experience more consciousness.”

— David Sheff

60. “It took my near death, however, to comprehend that his fate – and Jasper’s and Daisy’s – is separate from mine. I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.”

— David Sheff

61. “I longed for someone to scrape out every remnant of Nic from my brain and scrape out the knowledge of what was lost and scrape out the worry and not only my anguish but his and the burning inside like I might scrape out the seeds and juicy pulp of an overripe melon, leaving no trace of the rotted flesh.”

— David Sheff

62. “Why do I want to meet him? No matter how unrealistic, I retain a sliver of hope that I can get through to him. That’s not quite accurate. I know I can’t, but at least I can put my fingertips on his cheek.”

— David Sheff

63. “Everything will be all right.”

— David Sheff

64. “I am grateful now to have it all – even the worry and the pain.”

— David Sheff

65. “I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayer seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war – endless and brutal war – disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addiction, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers. Here is one more. Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic. The.”

— David Sheff

66. “We are connected to our children no matter what. They are interwoven into each cell and inseparable from every neuron. They supersede our consciousness, dwell in our every hollow and cavity and recess with our most primitive instincts, deeper even than our identities, deeper even than our selves.”

— David Sheff

67. “Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid – terrified – to lose Nic, but I have lost him. In the past, I tried to imagine the unimaginable and I tried to imagine bearing the unbearable. I imagined losing Nic by overdose or accident, but now I comprehend that I have already lost him. Today, at least, he is lost.”

— David Sheff

68. “I keep a box in which I store his artwork and writings, like his response to an assignment in which he has been asked if you should always try your best. “I don’t think you should always try your best all the time,” he writes, “because, let’s say a drug atick asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs.” Another assignment that goes into the box is.”

— David Sheff

69. “From them, I learned another lesson: that I can accept-in fact am relieved to accept-a world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white. There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.”

— David Sheff

70. “Fentanyl is fifty times stronger than heroin. Another concern is an opioid called carfentanil, which is as much as one hundred times more potent than fentanyl. According to the New York Times, an amount smaller than a snowflake could kill a person.”

— David Sheff

71. “Parents are suckers.”

— David Sheff

72. “And yet every time I think I can’t take any more, I do.”

— David Sheff

73. “My drawing – now there are drops, tears, from the two branches of the tributary and six circles above it. Then I know – I have drawn the opening up of my brain and all that is in there – tears pain blood rage terror. The broken suitcase with the circles, its contents – me, former me – spilling out.”

— David Sheff

74. “The most ubiquitous form on the mainland is crystal, which is often manufactured with such ingredients as decongestants and brake cleaner in what the DEA has called “Beavis and Butt-head” labs in homes and garages. Mobile, or “box,” labs in campers and vans, and labs in motels, have been discovered in every state. In 2006, Bill Maher quipped, “If Americans get any dumber about science, they won’t even be able to make their own crystal meth.”

— David Sheff

75. “Misery is too self-absorbed to want much company.”

— David Sheff

76. “I go back, this time to a swankier neighborhood.”

— David Sheff

77. “A handsome woman with auburn hair cut short, wearing a silk blouse, cardigan, and wool pants, says that she is a doctor. Deeply sad, she admits that for more than a year she conducted surgeries while high on meth. She initially tried it at a party. “I felt better than I had ever felt before in my life,” she says. “I felt as if I could do anything. I never ever wanted to lose that feeling.”

— David Sheff

78. “I can try to forgive myself, whether or not she forgives me, because I was a child, but some things you just live with because you cannot go backward.”

— David Sheff

79. “For heroin users with a five-year history of addiction, it may take ten or fifteen years to help them come out of it, but if you start when they’re twenty-five, by the time they’re forty they’re pretty much rehabbed. If you don’t, most of them burn out by forty.”

— David Sheff

80. “I am a sucker to contemplate opening to the idea of healing.”

— David Sheff

81. “Maybe parents feel for every child.”

— David Sheff

82. “At the same time, the statistics are useful in a sobering way. They inform us that our adversary is formidable and they guard us against irrational optimism.”

— David Sheff

83. “Their deaths didn’t seem to apply to us, maybe because their deaths, like their lives, were exercises in excess. In some ways they were simply living out the music. “I’m wasted,” sang the Who. “I hope I die before I get old.” And “Why don’t you all just f-f-f-f-fade away.”

— David Sheff

84. “I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous.”

— David Sheff

85. “Nonetheless: if only and if only and if only.”

— David Sheff

86. “Of course I still want to believe him. I don’t think it’s simply that I am gullible, but I cannot fathom the implications of his behavior. When change takes place gradually, it’s difficult to comprehend its meaning.”

— David Sheff

87. “I also know that parents have discretionary recall, blocking out everything that contradicts our carefully edited recollections – an understandable attempt to dodge blame. Conversely, children often fixate on the indelibly painful memories, because they have made a stronger impression.”

— David Sheff

88. “The devout are not spared.”

— David Sheff

89. “I wish someone had shaken me and said, “Intervene while you can before it’s too late.” It may not have made a difference, but I don’t know.”

— David Sheff

90. “In the car, however, I see a stranger. And yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately.”

— David Sheff

91. “He is brilliant and wonderful and charismatic and loving when he’s not using, but like every addict I have ever heard of, he becomes a stranger when he is, distant and foolish and self-destructive and broken and dangerous.”

— David Sheff